Marie writes: Much beloved and a never ending source of
amusement, Simon's Cat is a popular animated cartoon series by the
British animator Simon Tofield featuring a hungry house cat who
uses increasingly heavy-handed tactics to get its owner to feed it. Hand-drawn using an A4-size Wacom Intuos 3 pen and tablet,
Simon has revealed that his four cats - called Teddy, Hugh, Jess and
Maisie - provide inspiration for the series, with Hugh being the primary
inspiration. And there's now a new short titled "Suitcase". To view
the complete collection to date, visit Simon's Cat at YouTube.

Marie writes: The West Coast is currently experiencing a heat
wave and I have no air conditioning. That said, and despite it currently
being 80F inside my apartment, at least the humidity is low. Although
not so low, that I don't have a fan on my desk and big glass of ice tea
at the ready. My apartment thankfully faces East and thus enjoys the
shade after the sun has crossed the mid-point overhead. And albeit
perverse in its irony, it's because it has been so hot lately that I've
been in the mood to watch the following film again and which I highly
recommend to anyone with taste and a discerning eye.

My mom, the criminal; two new books that want to be the next Lolita; heart disease cut in half, but we're not cheering; how to take care of your smartphone battery; remembering the actress Elizabeth Hartman; R. Crumb's rejected gay marriage New Yorker cover; the most popular movies outside the United States

You emailed me the questions to this interview on March 15, 2013. In your March 16th reply to my email, you said: The piece will go out to all my print syndication customers. (“Print!” How times change.)

Ramin Bahrani, the best new American director of recent years, has until now focused on outsiders in this country: A pushcart operator from Pakistan, a Hispanic street orphan in New York, a cab driver from Senegal working in Winston-Salem. NC. His much-awaited new film, "At Any Price," is set in the Iowa heartland and is about two American icons: A family farmer and a race car driver. It plays Sunday and Monday in the Toronto Film Festival.

This appreciation is a slightly revised-for-2012 version of an article originally published online at Microsoft Cinemania in 1996. It was just one of several pieces in a package celebrating the 70mm restoration release of "Vertigo" that year.

Alfred Hitchcock's "Vertigo" is one of the most ravishing Technicolor films ever made -- all the more so in its VistaVision-to-70mm restored version. And color plays a key part in the mystery, emotion and psychology, of the film. Colors evoke feelings, and while Hitchcock liked to say that "Psycho" (made two years later) was "pure cinema" in black-and-white, "Vertigo" is a symphony of color, its multi-hued themes and motifs as vividly orchestrated as Bernard Herrmann's famous score.

I first saw "Vertigo" on network television in the late 1960s or early 70s, shortly before it was withdrawn from release. I think I was somewhere between 12 and 14 years old -- I know I saw it by myself on my parents' new 19-inch color TV one night when mom and dad went to some neighborhood grown-up party -- and I'm sure I didn't understand the half of it. But it stayed with me -- haunted me, you might say -- between that fateful evening and its re-release in the mid-80s. By then, "Vertigo" had become, if not quite the Holy Grail of the American Cinema (after all, "Rear Window" and "The Manchurian Candidate" had been unavailable for years, too -- and a great deal of "The Magnificent Ambersons" is still at the bottom of the ocean), then at least one of its most coveted (and fetishized) treasures.

The king is dead. Long live the king. Welles' "Citizen Kane" has been dethroned from the Sight & Sound list of the greatest films of all time, and replaced by Hitchcock's "Vertigo." It's not as if nobody saw this coming. The list first appeared in 1952, and "Vertigo" (1958) made the list for the first time only in 1982. Climbing slowly, it placed five votes behind "Kane" in 2002. Although many moviegoers would probably rank "Psycho" or maybe "North by Northwest" as Hitch's best, for S&S types his film to beat was "Notorious" (1946). That's the one I voted for until I went through "Vertigo" a shot at a time at the University of Virginia, became persuaded of its greatness, and put it on my 2002 list.

The first time I saw him, he was striding toward me out of the burning Georgia sun, as helicopters landed behind him. His face was tanned a deep brown. He was wearing a combat helmet, an ammo belt, carrying a rifle, had a canteen on his hip, stood six feet four inches. He stuck out his hand and said, "John Wayne." That was not necessary.

Wayne died on June 11, 1979. Stomach cancer. "The Big C," he called it. He had lived for quite a while on one lung, and then the Big C came back. He was near death and he knew it when he walked out on stage at the 1979 Academy Awards to present Best Picture to "The Deer Hunter," a film he wouldn't have made. He looked frail, but he planted himself there and sounded like John Wayne.

John Wayne. When I was a kid, we said it as one word: Johnwayne. Like Marilynmonroe. His name was shorthand for heroism. All of his movies could have been titled "Walking Tall." Yet he wasn't a cruel and violent action hero. He was almost always a man doing his duty. Sometimes he was other than that, and he could be gentle, as in "The Quiet Man," or vulnerable, as in "The Shootist," or lonely and obsessed, as in "The Searchers," or tender with a baby, as in "3 Godfathers."

There's nothing quite like the movies if you want to learn what people's hopes and dreams were during the period in which they were made. Take for instance the recent "Up in the Air". In the present when air travel has turned into something to be endured, George Clooney's Ryan Bingham showed us how it can become an enticing way of life. The same subject was also portrayed extensively, under a very different light, some forty years as the "Airport" movies dealt with our fears of dying in new and horrible ways, while glamorizing our dreams of flying first-class, surrounded by a movie star in every seat. As the trailer for one of these features once put it: "on board, a collection of the rich and the beautiful!" They also marked the advent of a new genre (the Disaster Film) as well as the "Ark movie" which Ebert's Little Movie Glossary defines as "mixed bag of characters trapped in a colorful mode of transportation". How many films can claim to this kind of impact?

Marie writes: Behold an extraordinary collection of Steampunk characters, engines and vehicles created by Belgian artist Stephane Halleux. Of all the artists currently working in the genre, I think none surpass the sheer quality and detail to be found in his wonderful, whimsical pieces...

Marie writes: I love illustrators best in all the world. There's something so alive about the scratch and flow of pen & ink, the original medium of cheeky and subversive wit. And so when club member Sandy Kahn submitted links for famed British illustrator Ronald Searle and in the hopes others might find him interesting too, needless to say, I was quick to pounce; for before Ralph Steadman there was Ronald Searle...
"The two people who have probably had﻿ the greatest influence onmy life are Lewis Carroll and Ronald Searle."-- John LennonVisit Kingly Books' Ronald Searle Gallery to view a sordid collection of wicked covers and view sample pages therein. (click to enlarge image.) And for yet more covers, visit Ronald Searle: From Prisoner of War to Prolific Illustrator at Abe Books.